Monthly Archives: December 2012

Degrees of likeness

Social media has taken the ease of expressing oneself to a whole new level. People express their opinion on everything from an everyday product to a television show to an event to a movement. Issues are discussed, recommendations are made and reviews are shared to make this world more connected than ever before. This provides a whole new challenge to measure and learn about what the opinion flow is from a market research perspective.

Lets talk about an interesting question of “how much”. The point is simple, do you like something enough to go for it? Or on the other hand, do you despise something so much that you will recommend against it? You might like a product, but not enough to buy it. Or in a more interesting case, in deciding whether to see a movie or not, you might dislike the actor, but like the plot enough to sit through it for a couple of hours.

The important thing lies in the sophistication of analysis. You got to understand the difference between people being on the fence or on either side of the fence. But the more important thing is to understand how strongly have people formed their opinion. Metaphorically speaking, how tall is the fence to let people cross from one side to the other. The next step is to figure out the reason behind an opinion and factors that can play a role in impacting that opinion. 

The beauty of market research techniques developed by MavenMagnet is to understand the degree of likeness people have about a certain topic without putting them in a box. This provides us the capability to extract patterns, form key takeaways and make actionable recommendations to help in making critical business decisions. 

Business of distribution

Distribution in very simple terms is taking goods and services from producers to consumers (or retailers who take it to consumers). The task of distribution has paramount importance in a consumer business. You can produce the best product in the world but unless there’s a well-oiled machinery to take that product to the consumer, you cannot be successful. On the other hand, if you are the distributor with the best reach, you can attain success by taking a good product and placing it in the market. This market dynamics gives the distributors unparalleled strength in the power play in their industry.

Pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries where distributors play a very important role of taking innovative drugs and making it accessible to the consumers worldwide. Another industry where distributors play a commanding role is entertainment. In case of movie distribution, its more of an oligopoly where a few studios control the worldwide distribution of the movies. A few publishing houses control the publication of majority of best sellers and a few television network have the bandwidth to reach millions of consumers.

Till very recently, and in many ways even today, the business of distribution in almost all industries is a game of few big players. Over the last few years, internet has played its role to pose an interesting challenge to the traditional players in this space. Though the challenge is still not big enough to create a dent in the business of distribution for the traditional players, it will be interesting to see how the business will adapt or how a new breed of distributors will leverage the digital media to distribute products to the world in more efficient and cost-effective ways.